IT'S THE POLICY, STUPID

It's not a failure of intelligence, it's a failure of intelligence.

But the fallacy in the administration's appointment of a commission to study intelligence failures is that there is almost never such a thing as a pure intelligence failure. Intelligence failure is usually linked to policy failure.

It's easy to see why Bush, or any president, would not want to call attention to that link. But the commission should have.
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What's worse, policy failure has actually caused intelligence failure in North Korea. From 1994 to 2003 North Korea's plutonium was at a known location, Yongbyon, where it was measured, handled and surveilled by international (including American) inspectors. We could inspect it -- or bomb it -- at any time. But when North Korea threw the inspectors out and threatened to truck the plutonium away to a hidden location, the United States did nothing. In due course the North Koreans made good on their threat and took the plutonium away. Are we now supposed to believe that it is an "intelligence failure" that we don't know where it is?

A second member of the axis of evil, Iran, demonstrates the same point. Iran, unlike North Korea, denies it has a nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration firmly contends that it does and is almost surely right, even though the intelligence is apparently not a "slam dunk." But since the administration does not plan either to attack Iran's nuclear sites or to try to negotiate them away (the Europeans are supposed to be trying the negotiation route), it hardly matters whether we know all the details.

The "intelligence failure" that prompted the creation of the Robb-Silberman commission was, of course, Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction. Here there surely was a policy -- full-scale invasion, no less -- and no one can accuse the Bush administration of inaction. Knowing what we thought we knew, invasion was absolutely the right decision. WMD are too dangerous to take chances. But Bush has since made it clear that even if he knew then what we know now -- that the information on Hussein's weapons was "nearly worthless," in the words of the Robb-Silberman commission -- he would have invaded anyway. There were other reasons for his policy -- Hussein's mistreatment of his population and the wider implications for the Middle East of his continued rule in Iraq. Future historians will decide whether his policy was a failure or a success, but they will know from his own testimony that the CIA's "intelligence failure" was not the determining factor.

It therefore is a fact that in the three most important cases studied by the commission -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- the intelligence failures the commission so carefully identifies and makes recommendations to correct made no difference to policy success or failure.
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It therefore is a fact that in the three most important cases studied by the commission -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- the intelligence failures the commission so carefully identifies and makes recommendations to correct made no difference to policy success or failure.

The commission's recommendations focus on improving intelligence on classical proliferation targets -- rogue regimes such as the three axis-of-evil states and Libya. But in the post-Sept. 11 world, we have to fear WMD not just in the hands of national governments but in the hands of terrorists. Here the policy-intelligence mismatch is also evident. Osama bin Laden has declared it a "sacred duty" of jihadists to get nuclear weapons. We hardly need more intelligence on his intentions. But to make a bomb, bin Laden's followers must get either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. U.S. efforts to safeguard these materials worldwide, even after Sept. 11, have been halfhearted. The tremendous success of the Nunn-Lugar program in denuclearizing the former Soviet Union in the 1990s has not been replicated in the post-Cold War era of terrorism. If the United States had such a vigorous set of policies to combat nuclear terrorism, it would need good intelligence to implement those policies. But until we get the policy right, it hardly matters that the intelligence is imperfect.